Sunday, June 26, 2016

Another Bullshit Gun Meme

We all know that the mainstream media doesn't understand guns and makes very little effort to get the facts straight. For example, this article by CBS News, which attempts to rank states based on the number of "registered" firearms in the state. So, I looked for my state, Louisiana, and found this laughable bullshit.

Louisiana comes in at number 10, with 15.1 guns for every 1,000 residents. That's 69,668 registered firearms among 4,625,470 people

When I read that, I snorted. First of all, there are a lot more than 69,668 guns in Louisiana. It would surprise me if we had that few in my home parish of Rapides. So, I went to the NICS system, run by the FBI, and learned that Louisiana has had 66,961 handgun checks this year, and 39,298 long gun checks this year alone. This year ain't over yet. The biggest months for selling guns are still to come, yet we've already bought more guns THIS YEAR than CBS says we have in our total inventory.

CBS's numbers are utter bullshit. But that's not the only bullshit in those two sentences.

Except for Class III firearms, which are required to be registered under federal law, there is no registry in Louisiana. None. No law enforcement agency in Louisiana keeps a gun registry; that's also against the law.

This is CBS News, and they get the easily-checked facts in two sentences completely and totally wrong. 1) Their estimate of guns in Louisiana is short by several orders of magnitude and 2) except for NFA items, there are no guns registered in Louisiana.

If they are getting this wrong, I expect that every other fact that they report is wrong. Seriously. Those two facts were too easy to check. It took about three minutes on Google. Why should we believe anything that CBS News reports?

2 comments:

The story is actually even dumber than it looks. According to what they wrote on the first few pages, they only counted NFA weapons. Ordinary handguns, rifles, and shotguns aren't included in that 69,668 number.

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